IAF Gets Its First ‘Fully Ops by Day’ Woman Combat Pilot

NEW DELHI: Flight Lieutenant Bhawana Kanth can now go to battle in her MiG-21 `Bison’ supersonic jet during daytime. She has become the country’s first woman fighter pilot to becomes “fully ops (operational) by day” in the IAF.

Bhawana, who hails from Darbhanga in Bihar, has become the first of the three in her batch of women fighter pilots – the other two are Flight Lieutenants Avani Chaturvedi and Mohana Singh – to successfully complete her “day operational syllabus” on the MiG-21s at the Nal airbase in Bikaner.

“She is the first women fighter pilot to qualify to undertake missions by day on a fighter aircraft. Bhawana joined her fighter squadron in November 2017 after initial flying on Pilatus turbo-props and Kiran trainers as well as Hawk advanced jet trainers. She flew her first solo on a MiG-21 Bison in March 2018,” said IAF spokesperson Group Captain Anupam Banerjee.
Though Bhawana can be deployed for day-time missions, her gruelling training regime in handling the highly-demanding and ageing MiG-21s, which have virtually the highest landing and take-off speed in the world at 340 kmph, is not yet over. She will have to now learn night flying during the “moon” and “dark phases” to become a fully operational fighter pilot.
Bhawana, on her part, had earlier said it was her “dream to fly like a free bird” when she was growing up in the refinery township of Begusarai, where her father was an engineer in IOCL. “It’s now my aim to become a good fighter pilot, fight for the nation and make my parents proud,” she said.

Before being commissioned into the fighter stream after basic training in June 2016, Bhawana had completed her BE (Medical Electronics) from the BMS College of Engineering at Bengaluru and is deeply into adventure sports like trekking, rock climbing, rappelling, rafting and the like.
The IAF has so far inducted six women into its fighter flying stream on “an experimental basis” for five years. With it taking around Rs 15 crore to train a single fighter pilot, IAF had for long resisted inducting women in the combat stream because it felt it would disrupt “tight fighter-flying schedules” if they got married and had children.

But women like Bhawana, who has learnt tactical flying and manoeuvres after consolidating her general handling of MiG-21s in multiple solo sorties, and the others have shattered the glass ceiling. The IAF did not show favouritism to Avani and Bhawana, who were posted to MiG-21 squadrons rather than the easier-to-handle modern fighters like Sukhoi-30MKIs or Mirage-2000s.
This, of course, will also ensure they undertake “air defence missions” over Indian territory in the event of war (MiG-21s are basically meant to intercept incoming enemy aircraft), and not go for strike missions deep into enemy territory.

Source: ToI

Image Courtesy: IWB